Blog #7 - Cyberbullying

Cyberbullying in simplistic terms is someone who bullies others through various online forums such as, chat rooms, emails, text messages, online gaming, and Facebook and other social media platforms. Within these forums, the perpetrator, or bully, is singling out a person with less power to defend themselves and inflicts repeated aggressive behaviors in order to cause harm to the victim (Faucher, Cassidy, & Jackson, 2015).  

Top Ten Forms of Cyberbullying

In reading the article From Sandbox to the Inbox: Comparing the Acts, Impacts, and Solutions of Bullying in K-12, Higher Education, and the Workplace, it was shocking to read that, within the K-12 world, 36% of students reported to being victims of cyberbullying, but it was even more shocking to read that 32% admitted to cyberbullying others. 

The impacts from cyberbullying are very real and overwhelming. Depression, lack of self-esteem, anxiety, stress, suicidal ideation, and psychosomatic problems (headaches or sleep disturbances) are all possible impacts. This impacts also outreach to other areas of the victims' life, such as school, because other impacts can include school avoidance, concentration problems, and academic problems.

Librarians have a special role in doing their part to help stop cyberbullying. They can first start by bringing awareness to the issue and encourage students to talk about their experiences. Students need to clearly understand what constitutes cyberbullying and why it is wrong. Students need to know that not reporting knowing or seeing someone else being bullied is also being part of the problem. Explain to them their options if they find themselves in this position. Likewise, how to report if they themselves are the victim. Community High School District 99 has come up with a really interesting way to combat cyberbullying by establishing a program, Digital Citizenship Project, that focuses on digital citizenship rather than just cyberbullying. One aspect of the program that I found really interesting was that high school students were partnered with middle school students to act as mentors and guide the younger students on anti-bullying best practices. For more information about the project, please click here.

October is National Bullying Prevention Month - Here are some resources that might be helpful:

• StopBullying.gov
• Standing Up, Not Standing By: An Anti-Bullying Toolkit for Educators (CommenSense)
• Books about bullying (broken up by age groups)
• Bullying Statistics
• More Than Just Books: Librarians as a Source of Support for Cyberbullied Young Adults
• Shaping Digital Citizens

References:

Faucher, C., Cassidy, W., & Jackson, M. (2015). From sandbox to the inbox: Comparing the acts, impacts, and solutions of bullying in K-12, higher education, and the workplace. Journal of Education and Training Studies. 3(6), 111-125.

Orech, J. (2012). How it's done: Incorporating digital citizenship into your everyday curriculum. Tech & Learning, 33(1), 16-18.

Blog #6 - Kahoot!

Kahoot! is a hoot, and the kids think so too! This is the one tool that was repeatedly asked for when I was a classroom teacher. Now that I am an elementary school librarian, it is still a viable and effective tool to utilize during my library instruction.

Kahoot! is a free online program that can be used in a school or business setting or even for personal use via a computer or app. The Kahoot! platform presents learning in a game-based trivia format. There are premade games or you have the opportunity to create your own game to personalize the experience.

Signing up for Kahoot! is easy and will really add some excitement to your class. So, how exactly would you use Kahoot! in the library? One great thing about Kahoot! is they are thinking about everyone who might use their tool, even librarians! Kahoot! interview Sarah, a librarian from Massachusetts, to see how she used it in her library. In the interview, Sarah stated that she was able to find kahoots created by other librarians about a variety of topics, such as Caldecott Awards and the Dewey Decimal System. You could also use Kahoot! to review library procedures or review authors you have studied. The possibilities are really endless. Click here to be taken to a page where you can play some library specific games on your own. 

Here is a wonderful presentation created by Danielle Apfelbaum who is a librarian:

Blog #5 - Thank you Rewordify!

Have you ever read something and thought, “What did that mean?” So, maybe then you grabbed a dictionary to look up some of the unfamiliar words, only to be further confused. Now imagine being a student going through this. How many students just keep pushing through because they are too embarrassed to ask for assistance to help in understanding what they read? Maybe they have self-esteem issues or maybe they have some type of disability that makes reading and comprehending text hard. The good news is I have found something to help.

Rewordify (www.rewordify.com) is a free website that offers help to students in understanding complex passages of text. In simplistic terms, the students enter the complex passage and Rewordify will rephrase it into simpler terms. I decided to try this out for myself. I picked an excerpt from Homer’s Odyssey and was pleasantly surprised with how Rewordify interpreted the text (see image below). The default setting of Rewordify has the site highlight the words that have been modified. It was nice and helpful to be able to see the two passages above one another and to be able to refer back to the original passage.  

Rewordify proved to me that it could help older students, but what about younger students? I decided to go onto National Geographic for Kids and pull up an article. I found one on Ocras, and again I was so pleased with the results. The younger students might need more assistance using the site, but I think it could be just as helpful for elementary students as it could be for high school and college students.

To use Rewordify all that is needed is a computer and access to the internet. Once you get to the website, you are ready to begin. On the top toolbar there is an option to modify settings, seek help, as well as a demo. The demo will walk you through how to use the site. I think that this would be a great tool in any library because a library’s main goal is to get information to our patrons mostly through reading and “we” lose readers when they can’t comprehend the text. So, it doesn’t matter the reason behind the struggle of comprehension as long as we are finding ways to help.

Everyone in the classroom can use this assistive tool. Not only does it help to make the text more understandable but it also helps in the understanding and learning of new vocabulary as well as better understanding of parts of speech. Click here to read about how Eric W., a classroom teacher, uses Rewordify. This TeachersFirst review offers great ideas about how to use Rewordify in the classroom, such as having the students guess the meaning of context clues and then using Rewordify to test their guesses. iLearnTechnlogy also has some great idea. Blogger, Avi Spector, had a great viewpoint on the limitations of Rewordify when he wrote: